plumesofio - Tumblr blog

[plumesofio]

Remember kids if you disagree with any transfem about anything it’s because you’re a transmisogynist, no exceptions <3

[plumesofio]

If you don't wanna be called a transradfem, stop spouting radical feminist ideas and just sticking trans on the front? "You just call every transfeminist a transradfem!" Last I checked, julia serano, susan stryker, jules gill-peterson, none of the genuine transfeminists I've read incorporated radfem beliefs into their works. But when someone on here is saying shit like "all oppression is rooted in transmisogyny, trans men's gender makes them dangerous, choosing to be a man is immoral," what in the hell else am I supposed to call that?

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Transradfems will say/reblog shit like "someone bringing up oppression making you uncomfortable is one hundred percent something that you need to reconsider always" (actual quote) in regard to transmisogyny but then turn around and say "anyway transandrophobia isn't real you whiny theyfabs just hate trans women <3"

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i dont check out the tags for like, a few weeks, and its suddenly full of transandrophobes and transmisogynists alike. no, all transfems arent "whiny" and "out to get you". no, all transmascs arent "secret/future terfs" "wielding their afab privilege" or whatever the fuck. please learn that everyone else in these conversations are people, not caricatures.

[plumesofio]

getting called unusual a lot lately. i'll take it as a compliment thanks lol

[plumesofio]

Ty /g. You're right most ppl who use tme/tma do so to mean "everyone but transfems has it easier than transfems" and insulting tmes is always "punching up." It also does unfairly put things on other ppl; everyone afab or presumed to be afab is told they're tme for example. But I don't feel it'll be used like this forever. I don't believe the only options are to keep it the same or reject it entirely--if folks learn to stop treating it as an identity-based privileged/oppressed binary then it could actually be helpful. And if tma folks come up with other terms to talk abt these areas of privilege and disprivilege I'll jump right on em. But for now, I'd like to try to work w/ what's given to me.

I'm tme and I'm not gonna stop identifying as such just bc it makes you uncomfortable to consider you might have certain privileges as a transmasc too. Being transmasc or otherwise a non-tma trans person doesn't mean you inherently have the same experiences as me. But if you notice that in public and social situations you are treated better than the trans women and transfems around you, you should really think on that. It doesn't make you a bad or universally privileged person. It doesn't mean no trans women and fems ever have privileges compared to you in other spheres. Transandrophobia and exorsexism are serious and not all tma people deal with those. But tma folks are asking to be heard abt the kinds of mistreatment they notice and I am doing my best to listen. Are you?

[plumesofio]

Srry but the fact of the matter is that most ppl have been trained through popular media and the transmisogyny that permeates our culture in general to associate "male femininity" with sexual aggression but not "female masculinity" to the same extent or in the same way. That doesn't mean transmascs are never treated like predators or threats, but for many of us our appearance doesn't elicit that same instinctive Ick or Alert feeling cis folks get when they see someone they perceive as transfeminized. Talk abt issues transmascs disproportionately experience all you want (e.g. infantilization, erasure, suicide, certain reproductive rights, hrt access, etc.) but don't just plug your ears when tma ppl are telling you theirs.

[plumesofio]

I'm certainly not stealth, I get treated like a rlly butch lesbian more than anything else. Yet when I'm w/ trans women who also don't pass, they still get treated worse than me in public. The pattern can be broken, but tme ppl being given more respect and grace in social situations than tma ppl is in fact a pattern ppl report.

I have a lot of critiques of tme/tma as a framework, and I wouldn't be keen on copying it onto transandrophobia theory. But ppl have found it helpful to talk abt the way transfeminized ppl are treated differently than nontransfeminized ppl. It'd probably be helpful to have language for differences in experiences trans men and mascs have compared to other trans ppl too and I wouldn't stop anyone from creating some. If someone wanted to identify themselves as exempt from transandrophobia (as much as anyone can be exempt from a broad system of oppression) then like yeah sure go for it yk

I'm tme and I'm not gonna stop identifying as such just bc it makes you uncomfortable to consider you might have certain privileges as a transmasc too. Being transmasc or otherwise a non-tma trans person doesn't mean you inherently have the same experiences as me. But if you notice that in public and social situations you are treated better than the trans women and transfems around you, you should really think on that. It doesn't make you a bad or universally privileged person. It doesn't mean no trans women and fems ever have privileges compared to you in other spheres. Transandrophobia and exorsexism are serious and not all tma people deal with those. But tma folks are asking to be heard abt the kinds of mistreatment they notice and I am doing my best to listen. Are you?

[plumesofio]

Have you seen "A Self Defense Study Guide for Trans Women*" yet? You can find it here.

It talks about how a crowd including one of other queer and trans folks will often instinctively side against trans women and similarly perceived folks in public disagreements or cases of harassment/assault. The trans woman will often be painted as the aggressor or otherwise as a threat, regardless of the facts of the situation. This is especially the case for trans woc. As a 5'2 transmasc I don't worry about being being treated as a monster the same way. I don't necessarily expect people to jump to my defense either, but if I slap someone for groping me it's less likely I'll be turned on by everyone. I don't relate to this guide or feel a need for its tactics. That is my tme privilege.

[plumesofio]

I'm tme and I'm not gonna stop identifying as such just bc it makes you uncomfortable to consider you might have certain privileges as a transmasc too. Being transmasc or otherwise a non-tma trans person doesn't mean you inherently have the same experiences as me. But if you notice that in public and social situations you are treated better than the trans women and transfems around you, you should really think on that. It doesn't make you a bad or universally privileged person. It doesn't mean no trans women and fems ever have privileges compared to you in other spheres. Transandrophobia and exorsexism are serious and not all tma people deal with those. But tma folks are asking to be heard abt the kinds of mistreatment they notice and I am doing my best to listen. Are you?

[plumesofio]

didn’t say tme/tma was fine. you’re right, it’s often used in an identity-based, intersexist, transphobic way. here is how i discuss it in my pinned post:

i apologize if it did not come off this way but idid try to specify this is not the situation of all transmascs. that it is just me, and some other folks who’ve said similar things. here, if we were both stealth, i would have been treated like one of the cis guys (left alone) and she would been considered one of the girls instead. but when we both were known to be trans, me as transmasc and her as a trans woman, in that place i had social power over her and some other groups of transmasc folks have similar stories. not everyone transmasc. but enough to share our stories about. idc ill admit i’m not subject to transmisogyny. i experience transandrophobia instead and it looks different.

"TMA/TME is fine actually because this one specific time I was misgendered and considered in with the cis girls who were being awful towards a trans women in this specific social situation so that means I could have had power over her"

1. Way to ignore all the intersex/nonbinary/gnc people who take issue with this framework for completely different reasons

2. That's ONE specific SOCIAL situation, in which you weren't even considered trans to the other people around you. Consider the erasure of your own identity as an actual form of harm, too.

3. If you were an out and more masculine/passing transmasc, and the trans woman in question was stealth and passed, I can almost guarantee the roles would be reversed.

4. Countless times people have said that TMA/TME is about someone's relationship with systemic transmisogyny (yes there's a lot of contention and opposing opinions around the actual use of these terms and what they mean, but this is something I've specifically seen said multiple times as well). What you described was not systemic but social. Transmascs and trans men hold no systemic power over other trans people based on gender, whatsoever. There may be social privliges, yes, but that can also go every way and vary depending on circumstance and the types of bigots you're dealing with, and there's no one (trans)gender that holds privlige over other trans people in all scenarios. And especially not systemic.

5. Again, I am begging you to not downplay the erasure of your identity as "less harmful" because you aren't being assaulted over it. There's a reason why transmascs and trans men have higher suicide rates.

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“Tme/tma is wrong because no trans person has gendered power over another” that’s just straight up not true. I’m trans and yet sure as shit have power over transw&fs. If wym is that other trans ppl don’t inherently all have power over tw&fs I get what ur saying, that’s an overly simplified view of things. But like. Some do and I get why tw&fs wanna talk abt it.

During my first job out as trans, I was still early in transition and most ppl just saw me as a kinda ugly cis girl. I’d cut my hair shortish and started dressing masc and wore my little he/they pin. I was the only trans person there at first. And yeah it wasn’t a great time that first year. Customers at my job would ask me what I was and misgender me on purpose. But with my coworkers, as much as I chafed against this being the case, I was taken in as one of the girls. Later a new supervisor transferred in, let’s call her Laura. She was a cishet white woman with a little pride flag pin, ‘cause she had a gay kid and allegedly supported gay ppl. She got my pronouns wrong a lot, no matter how often I corrected her (and when she used em she only used they, never he) and that sucked major ass. But for the most part she was nice enough to me. A bit after that though, a visibly trans woman was hired, Destiny. We quickly became friends so I got to hear a lot about how the work environment was going for her. To put it briefly, Laura started up a little mean girl clique with other employees that was all awful to Destiny. Like misgendering her, insulting her, giving her all the worst manual labor tasks, spreading rumors. Destiny is one of the kindest most genuine human beings on the planet I’ll have you know, she didn’t do a thing to deserve this treatment. It came to management’s attention but instead of firing Laura she just got transferred to a better position somewhere else. Even outside of that, customers would call in to complain about Destiny over nothing while misgendering her. Eventually she even got hate crimed when a customer called her a slur and threw a full drink at her. Neither of us work there anymore. But the point is—I could’ve joined that mean girl clique if I’d wanted to. I had the ability to be horrible to Destiny with little to no downside if I so chose. I had oodles of social power over her even though we were both trans. This isn’t the situation of every transmasculine person but like. There, in that store, I was the tme, and she was the tma. Plain as day.

I doubt the tme/tma framework will be used in its current state forever, it’ll probably improve over time. But if you want every trans woman and fem to just Accept that no trans person has any power over them? You have a lot of perspective to gain.

[plumesofio]

It’s really fuckin infuriating bc transandrophobia conversations even like 6 months ago used to be pretty much free of genuine transmisogyny. There would be the occasional cryptoterf talking about amab privilege and afab solidarity or whatever but they’d get shit on by all the actual transmascs in the tags. But people would insist and insist and insist for years that every person using the word hated trans women. And look, your fuckin wishes are comin true. You’ve drawn the attention of people who actually do hate trans women and now they think it’s okay to say that shit around us. Now you can point and say “look, see, I told you, they were always all transmisogynists!” Congrats, now fuckin what do we do. What did you want us to do before, even. There was never once an attempt at improving how we talked abt shit and I can’t imagine there will be one now. Seems like we’re all just supposed to keel over and die so you never have to hear those stupid whiny toxic theyfab terf mras talk about their supposed “““issues””” again

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"Theyfab" is a James Somerton ass insult. You could tell me he made it up to express his disdain for Rebecca Sugar or something and I would 100% believe you

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“Theyfabs” “baeddels” “afab privilege” “male socialization” shut up shut UP fucking christ, leave my trans siblings the fuck alone. Stop using derogatory terms on marginalized groups, and stop insisting that trans ppl different than you actually have Tons of Privilege and any attempt to say otherwise is bc they wanna use it on you. Try listening to ppl about their experiences, god

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Transmisogyny theory as it was developed is built on a foundation of misunderstanding transm&m experiences. And transandrophobia theorists are constantly making claims about the transw&f experience without actually asking transw&fs. Where do we go from here?

The only way I see out of this stupid mess is to listen to each other. “But it’s [identity] that isn’t listening to me!” Ok but they feel unheard too. Why can’t we just believe each other abt our lived experiences and listen to other ppl’s.

Tme/tma terms aren’t going away any time soon; tw&fs clearly need for a way to communicate who has certain kinds of power over them. They’re not perfect terms, and they get used in shitty ways. It’s something to improve or replace, not reject and abolish. Some ppl use transfeminized (tfz?) and non-transfeminized to communicate that being affected by transmisogyny is based on perception rather than identity.

Transandrophobia theory isn’t going away any time soon; tm&ms clearly need for a way to communicate the gendered elements of the transphobia they experience. It’s not a perfect theory, and it gets used in shitty ways. It’s something to improve, not dismiss as an inherently transmisogynistic (TERF/MRA) thing to even talk abt. Can’t even say replace here, they’ve tried like a billion times. There are radicalized ppl in the convo and there are also genuine transfeminists. Learn to separate them.

We’re fucking dying out here y’all. All kinds of trans ppl. And this discourse is hurting ppl. Are we rlly gonna waste our finite time & breath deciding the Other Side is talking abt their oppression all wrong & needs to be put in their place. We can fix this I fuckin promise you. But you’re gonna have to talk to ppl who disagree with you sometimes to make it work.

[plumesofio]

Saw my first “I can’t be transmisogynistic I’m literally trans 🥺” in the wild today. While they were getting dunked on by transandrophobia blogs even lmao